Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [183]
Returned to London at the end of September, Morse began serious experiment on the cable—his original purpose in making the overseas trip. His resolve to break off with Cyrus Field and Field’s business associates was not easy to keep. In fact, he worked eagerly to ensure Field’s success, tolerating the ambiguities and indignities of their relationship for the sake of having not only his telegraphs but also himself present at the epochal cable-laying. Two Englishmen joined him for the experiments: Charles Bright, the brilliant twenty-five-year-old Superintendent of British telegraphs; and Dr. Edward Whitehouse, a physician who had given up all other work to devote himself to problems of cable transmission.
Morse and his colleagues took over a telegraph office on Old Broad Street, working at night when the system was not in commercial use. Since the great length of the undersea cable would retard the current, they particularly wanted to find out how rapidly a signal could be sent through. In one experiment, Morse and Whitehouse connected 10 gutta-percha-insulated cables of 200 miles each, making a continuous length of 2000 miles. Using a Morse recording instrument, and working through the night without sleep, they were able to send between 210 and 270 signals per minute—a rate fast enough to be commercially feasible. An insulated cable with a single conducting wire, Morse reckoned, could transmit at least 8 to 10 words a minute between Ireland and Newfoundland, over 14,000 words a day. White-house believed that by changing the signal code an even faster rate could be achieved.
The test results exhilarated Morse: “the doubts are resolved,” he wrote to Field, “the difficulties overcome, success is within our reach, and the great feat of the century must shortly be accomplished.” He accompanied Field in making a business call at the Foreign Office, where they spent an hour discussing the transatlantic venture with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon. The call evidently went well. The British government offered to supply ships for laying the cable, and agreed to pay £14,000 a year for using it, in effect subsidizing its operation for a guaranteed twenty-five years.
Morse’s stay abroad ended a week later, no less triumphantly than it had begun. Several British telegraph companies threw a lavish dinner for him at the Albion Hotel. In honoring Morse they also meant to encourage the friendlier Anglo-American relations implicit in the transatlantic cable. But in three ways the occasion was touchy. Within living memory, British troops had burned the city of Washington. Cultural warfare still raged, too, over the priority and comparative virtues of Morse’s system and Charles Wheatstone’s needle telegraph. And to preside over the ninety invited guests, the sponsors chose Wheat-stone’s former partner, W. Fothergill Cooke. The partnership had degenerated into a bitter feud. Cooke charged in print that Wheat-stone had stolen for himself the credit for their joint invention. Wheatstone had not been invited to the dinner but remained conspicuous by his absence.
The evening opened with toasts to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and to “The President and People of the United States.” In introducing Morse, Cooke carefully gave him his due and then some, without granting him everything. He observed that England and Europe could claim to have invented the telegraphs used in their countries. But the American version was “conceived, worked out, and perfected” by Morse, “depending on his own scientific knowledge …. He stands alone in America as the originator.” Cheers and laughter followed Cooke’s admission that the simplicity of Morse’s telegraph had brought it into use all over the Continent, “and the nuisance is that we in England are obliged to communicate abroad by means of his system.”
After the downing of three toasts to him, Morse rose to speak, amid